From Wednesday 18 December, we’ll be asking everyone who books tickets online to make a donation to the Royal Opera House. It’s a simple process that you will see when you are paying for your tickets online. We’re suggesting you might like to give £3 although you may prefer to select a different amount. You can, of course, choose to remove the donation altogether.

All the money we raise, whether from ticket sales, our restaurants and bars, shop, sponsorship and philanthropy, together with our funding from Arts Council England, goes towards making sure that we can continue to put on truly world-class opera and ballet, on our stages in Covent Garden and into cinemas around the country. It also supports the wide range of schools’ work and other ways in which our audiences can get involved with us through schemes such as Chance to Dance, Write an Opera, the Thurrock youth choir RM19 and our Welcome Performances.

The need for us to ask for voluntary donations, grants and sponsorship is more pressing than ever as the uncertain economic situation continues with further cuts to our government subsidy. We are a registered charity and the income we bring in through ticket sales does not cover the full cost of performances. Therefore each and every donation really does help, however small or large.

We are very grateful to all of you who already support the Royal Opera House through membership and donations. Together you contributed £23million last Season and your generosity and enthusiasm really makes a difference to what we can achieve. Thank you.

Fellow Jette Parker Young Artist Irish mezzo-soprano Rachel Kelly will now make her role debut as Mercédès for this performance, as well as singing the role on 21 and 23 December and 1 and 4 January, as previously advertised.

Rachel Kelly is currently singing the role of Second Esquire in The Royal Opera’s production of Parsifal. She sang the role of the Cat in El gato con botas during Meet the Young Artists Week for The Royal Opera.

Ratty in tweeds, Toad in a hip-level motor-car, Teddy-boy stoats and rabbits with long-eared balaclavas – Nicky Gillibrand's brilliantly witty Edwardian-with-a-twist costumes for Will Tuckett's The Wind in the Willows bring the animals of Kenneth Grahame’s beloved novel instantly to life. It’s not the first time dancers have been made to look, well, a little on the beastly side. As the Duchess Theatre's curtain is raised for the Royal Opera House’s first ever West End transfer, we take a look at a few of the varmints lurking around The Royal Ballet's repertory.

First in line is the notorious Peter Rabbit and his furry friends. Royal Ballet Founder Choreographer Frederick Ashton created Tales of Beatrix Potter for television in 1970, for a balletic film that was the brainchild of Richard Goodwin and his wife, designer and filmmaker Christine Edzard. They wanted to replicate Ms Potter's gorgeous watercolours as closely as possible – and the results were astutely padded costumes and an array of magnificent fibreglass heads, created by Rostislav Doboujinsky. Anthony Dowell knew the perfect children's ballet when he saw it and adapted Ashton's film for the Royal Opera House stage in 1992. Ever since, audiences have cheered as much as dancers have cursed the notoriously hot and heavy costumes.

There's a whole menagerie of Ashtonian animals, from the comedic cockerel that opens La Fille mal gardée to the transformed Bottom in The Dream, who combats the dual demands of prancing on point beneath a massive donkey mask. Their furry forbear is Pépé, the Mexican terrier, who nips around Ashton's early masterpiece A Wedding Bouquet (1937). Pépé had real-life inspiration in the Pépé belonging to writer Gertrude Stein, whose play inspired the ballet. Stein wrote, in her usual idiosyncratic style, 'Pépé the little Mexican dog is going to be on the stage not in person of course but a little girl to play him but even the littlest little girl is going to be a very large little Mexican'. She eventually allowed that 'Pépé the dog was charming'.

In one of the more surreal moments of A Wedding Bouquet Pépé dons a blue tutu and dances a pas de trois – it's one of Ashton's many allusions in the ballet to classical dance, here the wedding scene of The Sleeping Beauty, in which the wedding of Princess Aurora and Prince Florimund is attended by an alarming host of fairytale characters. Chief among them are White Cat and Puss-in-Boots, who dance an amorous cattish quarrel. The ballet also features an evil clutch of mousey cohorts to the villainess Carabosse – who have another classical counterpart in The Nutcracker's Mouse King and his army of mice.

Contemporary choreographers haven't shied away from the animal world. Christopher Wheeldon's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has creatures of all colours: the White Rabbit's tell-tale tail peeking through his coat, the capering tartan-clad critters of the caucus race, the Fish and Frog Footmen, sinuous Caterpillar and of course the flame-pink flamingos and cute chorus of hedgehogs – all brilliantly realized in Bob Crowley's eye-popping designs.

Animal designs have also been used in a more elegiac, mysterious way. The Royal Ballet's Resident Choreographer Wayne McGregor's Raven Girl – created in collaboration with Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife – imagines a girl who exchanges her arms for wings in her longing to join the world of ravens. And while David Bintley's sprightly 'Still Life'at the Penguin Café, created for the Company in 1988, is a colourful showcase – an ebullient Texan Kangaroo Rat, the Morris dancing Hog-nosed Fleas, the seraphic Southern Cape Zebra – it also carries a sobering message of animals endangered by human activities.

What are your favourite balletic animals?

The Wind in the Willows is on now at the Duchess Theatre and runs to 5 February 2014. Tickets are still available and can be purchased via the Royal Opera House or through the Duchess Theatre.

Julian Philips is one of the most versatile composers working today. He's won acclaim for his melding of words and music – and after a three-year-stint as Glyndebourne's first Composer in Residence his name is now firmly associated with opera. His works share a lively spirit of exploration, play and collaboration, and a drive to engage audiences and musicians of all ages – all qualities very much in evidence in his new opera How the Whale Became.

Philips has a chameleon-like ability to absorb other musical languages. Blues infuses his children's opera Varjak Paw, while the hero's origin – he's a handsome Mesopotamian Blue cat – is referenced in Arab-inflected music. Followers, a chamber opera created for Glyndebourne, retells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice across three centuries of musical styles. The magnificent Knight Crew, a community opera also created for Glyndebourne, draws on a wide lexicon of music theatre. There's The Yellow Sofa, a Portuguese drawing-room farce in which the splendidly upholstered eponymous furniture can't help breaking into fado (a sort of Portuguese chanson). Philips's ballet The Snow Queen, created with choreographer Michael Corder for English National Ballet, was adapted from a late work by Prokofiev, rehabilitating music that has been unjustly neglected.

Animals have often been the focus of Philips's work. His one-act operas Dolffin and Wild Cat were created as part of Welsh National Opera's 'Land, Sea, Sky' trilogy, which won the Royal Philharmonic Society's 2007 Education Award. These bilingual chamber operas were part of a three-year project involving more than thirty schools and a chorus of a hundred children, carrying messages of ecological awareness. There was a similar moral running through Philips's seven-minute street opera Save the Divacreated for The Opera Group and Friends of the Earth. And of course there's the feline crew of Varjak Paw, also created for The Opera Group, who commissioned Philips on the basis of his settings of Emily Dickinson's animal poems.

Consideration of venue seems to play a crucial role in Philips's development process. Save the Diva is a case in point, where Philips's tiny ensemble of accordion, trombone, soprano, baritone and street performer meant the work really could be put on almost anywhere. Followers encouraged its Glyndebourne audience to follow the performers through three rooms of the Glyndebourne house as the performers (and music) journeyed through the centuries.

But most thrilling of all is the ever-present thread of education running through Philips's works. Currently Head of Composition at the Guildhall, Philips has a clear urge to motivate the younger generations. Knight Crew perfectly encapsulated this attitude, Philips working with chorus master Gareth Malone in a huge project for a 50-strong youth chorus and an orchestra that brought together 30 amateurs and 30 professionals. Malone documented the whole staggering process for the BBC in Gareth Malone Goes to Glyndebourne. Dolffin and Wild Cat were other strong examples of Philips's commitment to outreach and to engaging young children in music making, while he has also written countless concert works for children's choirs and orchestras. He also takes care to nurture musicians just beginning their professional careers: Followers and Philips's other Glyndebourne chamber orchestra Of Water and Tears each gave solo roles to members of the Glyndebourne Chorus, and Philips has been instrumental in establishing a Guildhall composer residency with the Royal Opera House.

Philips's music is witty, beguiling and endlessly inventive – all qualities he seems to bring to every stage of the creative process. As he says, ‘Opera is risky – I want to take the risk. We’re all on the same level, all taking risks. The possible outcome is that we create a really exciting piece of work’.

The production is generously supported by The Taylor Family Foundation, Mrs Lily Safra, The Royal Opera House Endowment Fund, The Lord Leonard and Lady Estelle Wolfson Foundation and Britten-Pears Foundation.

The recent TheatreCraft careers fair, held at the Royal Opera House, attracted over 1,000 young people interested in working backstage in theatre, making this year's event the biggest so far.

The event, which was opened by acclaimed director Jamie Lloyd, featured more than 50 exhibitors, over 70 workshops, networking hubs and an ‘Ask the Experts’ zone that offered one-to-one advice sessions with 33 industry experts.

‘It’s ok not to have an idea of what exactly you want to do in theatre or why,’ said Jamie when opening the fair. ‘It is your passion and drive to be part of the industry that is the most important thing.’

Jamie Simmons, a 22-year-old student and aspiring director based in Leeds, braved a 3am start and long journey via bus to arrive in time for the opening speech.

‘Meeting Jamie Lloyd was brilliant,’ he said. ‘Standing face to face with potential employers allowed me to portray my passion for, understanding of and dedication to the arts. I hope to find some kind of work placement out of the contacts I made today.’

Although the next TheatreCraft fair won't take place for another year, there are still plenty of opportunities to explore careers backstage. The Royal Opera House runs Apprenticeship schemes in a wide range of backstage areas - including Scenic Art, Stage Engineering and Armoury. There are also opportunities for work experience placements.